Do you like one million girls? Do you like them bespeckling the starry sky, draped across as many bookshelves, limpid in their plumped-out graces, folded like hot laundry, and waiting for you? With Mommy’s Driving, a startling drop, Fran Marceline delivers them to you like the pervert-savant of international renown she was always meant to be, twisting fabulist, faggy 5th Ave illustration motifs in with graff culture, a deserted mall’s ubiquity of mannequins, transsexual mimetic obsessions, blueprint coutures, Renaissancial light-and-dark fixations, and a seemingly biblical need to multiply. We see girls pissing, girls pulling around other, bigger girls on petted chain, disembodied heads, drops of blood, fragments of language (a rose is a rose is a rose..), architectural digest-ion, and enough T and A to satisfy even the most over-exposed patrons of the porn theatre she presides over in her day job at Cinema l’Amour. I suppose that would make this explosive and committedly maximalist output her night job, which is just as well.

Fran, in this work, likes to see girl grow so overripe they’re bursting. There’s an uninnocencing going on here, like overplanting a garden out of an outsized love of life, but the garden rests under the fluttering hem of a small linen skirt, and it’s a pattern of movement that’s signaling you to come closer, and to smell the flowers.

If you feel a sense of homecoming, that’s your brain witnessing. Frannie’s ascension into a profound personal and artistic maturity. These drawings together form an ecstatic document, a proceeding into a girl-futurity that provides ballast against the slings and arrows that all too often define transition. Becoming a woman can be tough! You have to kiss your old life goodbye, and that’s, as academics might say, both hard and sad. But Frannie’s out here in a swirl of wild bravado, imagining collapsing and overlapping realms of womanhood, standing in the middle of a benevolent maelstrom of doll parts, lolita dresses, dyke hagiographies, bitten lips, and real piss. It’s seventeen balancing acts in a trench coat, the scope and scale of which would leave a lesser artist sucking her thumb; but there’s not and never will be a need to worry—here, mommy’s driving.

With love, admiration, and a pitched tent,

— Text by Mona Gendron

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Frannie Marceline Williams (b. 1996, Châteauguay, CA) is a painter based in Montréal. In Frannie’s work, figures emerge from a world of blank spaces, screens, and geometric abstraction. Recent previous exhibitions include Mommy’s Driving at Carrefour, Montreal, Circles at Pangée, Montreal, Heartbreaks at Franz Kaka, Toronto, I am Really Alive at Espace Maurice, Montreal, and My God of Divisions an off-site solo exhibition in Montréal.